Five-Tour Veteran Elliot Ackerman Charts New Territory in a Charged New Novel, Green on Blue

War literature tends to have its own particular flavor, whether it’s the elegiac tones of World War I novels or the corrosively ironic voices that came out of Vietnam. But the extraordinary outpouring of fiction written by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan—wars that remain raw, incomplete, and ill-understood—have been markedly diverse in style, ranging from haunted lyricism (machine gunner **Kevin Powers’**s The Yellow Birds) to mordantly gut-wrenching (public affairs officer **Phil Klay’**s National Book Award–winning short stories, Redeployment). Now, there’s a fresh wave on the horizon, which includes **Elliot Ackerman’**s Green on Blue (Scribner), Ross Ritchell’s The Knife (Blue Rider Press), **Matt Gallagher’**s Young Blood (Atria), and War of the Encyclopaedists (Scribner), by Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite. There are no clear battle lines here, no good guys and bad: All of these novels, written with the self-awareness necessary in a post–Tim O’Brien world, share a demolished idealism and an unfiltered experience of these wars not found in any newspaper. Most of all, they share an uneasy sense of complicity that comes from having chosen to fight them.

“You can’t ignore the fact that everyone who was there volunteered,” says Ackerman, 34, via Skype from Istanbul, where he lives with his wife, Xanthe, and their two children. “I have a lot of mixed emotions about these experiences, but I chose all of it and I kept choosing it, and there’s a sort of sadness associated with that.” A much-decorated Marine—Purple Heart, Silver Star—Ackerman did five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Out today, his first novel is a standout both for its setting—remote Shkin firebase, a kind of twenty-first century Guadalcanal—and for the austere grace of its prose. But what sets the novel apart in the annals of American war literature is its daring shift in perspective: It’s written not from the point of view of an American soldier, but that of an Afghan boy, Aziz, who joins a U.S.-backed militia after a militant’s bomb gravely injures his older brother.

“Many would call me a dishonest man,” Aziz begins his story, “but I’ve always kept faith with myself.” As Aziz rises in the ranks, we meet such characters as Mr. Jack, an American in mirrored sunglasses who keeps the money flowing, and Commander Sabir, a superbly drawn malefactor in the vein of Conrad’s Kurtz. With understated grandeur, a portrait of Afghanistan in microcosm takes shape, one in which profit and peace are at odds, lines of allegiance are constantly being redrawn, and coming-of-age entails a swift initiation into moral ambiguity and brutality.

The preppily handsome Ackerman, who wanted a profession in which his “performance really mattered,” doesn’t fit what we think of as the military archetype. Born in Los Angeles, he grew up in London and Washington, D.C., the son of financier Peter Ackerman and novelist Joanne Leedom-Ackerman, a vice president of PEN International; his older brother, Nate, a former Olympic wrestler, is a mathematician (the author recalls “banging G.I. Joes together” as a four-year-old in the back of the family Volvo while his six-year-old brother was solving algebra equations). “My father understood my decision to go somewhere and prove myself. The military is, for all its quirks, a place where no one cares where you’re from,” he says. “For my mother, it was more difficult. That being said, she tapped incredible reserves of strength, becoming someone I could always talk to about the challenges of combat. She knows my most difficult war stories, ones where I lost friends, ones where I still question some of the decisions I made. But I don’t think her emotional trajectory is unique. Whether your mother is a novelist like mine or a third-generation military wife, the idea of a son or daughter being in mortal danger is terrifying.”

Joining the Marine ROTC in 1998 while he was a student at Tufts University—where he roomed with Nate, then a student at Harvard, and began dating Xanthe—Ackerman was commissioned immediately upon graduation. “9/11 happened, the Iraq War happened, and it sort of added a level of gravity to everything,” the author explains. “Once you get into that world, you get into these very intense friendships. You have this very crystalline sense of what you all are doing.” His military service took him from the second battle of Fallujah to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but it was the two years he spent at Shkin, where he was a combat advisor to a few hundred Afghan troops, that inspired this novel. “These guys became my war buddies. But we can’t hang out at the VFW and have a beer. Chances are, I’m not going to ever see any of them again. And so for me, writing the book was a last act of friendship.”

Aziz’s loyalties are tested as he grows closer to a magnetic tribal leader named Atal—and to his alluring young “niece,” Fareeda, a war orphan like Aziz. Ackerman wisely underplays their charged scenes, as he does the political situation, evoking instead the psychic experience of permanent war. “When I was sitting there trying to write it, so much of the emotional space I was tapping into wasn’t about, ‘Oh, this happened to me in Afghanistan and I’m going to render it.’ I was thinking about being a father and son and brother, and what that meant to me.” The result is compassionate, provocative, and alive to the tremendous narrative risk involved in taking on the gaze of the “other”: try imagining Apocalypse Now from the perspective of the South Vietnamese.

“What struck me was that he wrote with seemingly deep reserves of empathy,” recalls Andre Dubus III, who taught Ackerman at Tufts. “Unlike a lot of his classmates, it seemed easy for him to slip inside the private skin of another human being with words.” Using details ranging from poignant (the memory of a mother’s secret vice) to sardonic (a one-eyed goldfish named after Mullah Omar), Ackerman succeeds in making Aziz’s actions, hinted at in the novel’s title—“green on blue" refers to an attack on American troops by its allies—not only understandable, but inevitable.

“What happens when the cause you fight for threatens to destroy you? I wanted to explore that question,” says the author, who recalls going on a run with a fellow marine not long before leaving the service in 2011. “Out of the blue, he asked me, ‘Hey, do you think you have PTSD?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ How do we reckon with all the experiences that we’ve had, and all of our mutual friends whom we’ve lost?” When he called to tell his wife, Xanthe, a girls’ education specialist who works extensively in Africa, that he’d made the decision to leave the military, she was silent for a moment. Then she asked if he was sure it was what he really wanted. His mother, babysitting at the time, said to their infant daughter, “You brought him home.”

Imaginatively, however, he has never entirely left the front lines of conflict. Nine months later, he started the novel, which originally included an American character who debriefs Aziz. “I realized it was just an excuse to tell Aziz’s story, and I eventually decided that I just needed to go all in. It was frightening—if I didn’t get the voice right, I was dead.” The first Afghan to read the manuscript was no less than Khaled Hosseini, who was persuaded: “His most impressive feat is the creation of a convincing and credible world through his full immersion in Afghan culture.” Drawn less to war classics than to authors who negotiate thorny battlefields of colonialism and empire, race and power, Ackerman cites Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul as influences, as well as William Styron’s controversial The Confessions of Nat Turner, in which Styron assumes the voice of a leader of a slave revolt. After completing a White House fellowship, which he spent working on veterans’ issues, he moved to Istanbul to report on the Syrian civil war. He’s currently finishing his second novel, Dark at the Crossing, set on the Turkish-Syrian border.

While there’s a grave irony in the fact that it has fallen to the men and women who signed up to fight our forever wars to make the most powerful case against them, a novel like Ackerman’s suggests that telling a true war story in the twenty-first century also demands bearing witness to its global repercussions. “There are these moments in the military where you’re present at these enormous intersections of history and humanity,” he says. “I came out of the end of that and I just wanted to write. If you do it well, you know it will last. It can’t get blown away like everything else.”

The decorated five-tour veteran and novelist Elliot Ackerman traces the moment he realized he was ready to let go in a personal essay in the March issue of Vogue.